Conventional anti-aliasing techniques generate a z value and a color value for each sample within a pixel to produce an anti-aliased image. In general, as the number of samples per pixel increases the quality of the anti-aliased image also increases. The per-sample color values are combined for each pixel of an image to produce anti-aliased color data that is stored in the frame buffer.
The amount of memory needed to store the z and color data to produce the anti-aliased image increases based on the number of samples that are used. For example, when four samples are used for each pixel, the amount of memory needed to store the z and color data is four times the amount of memory needed to store the z and color data when only one sample is used for each pixel. In addition, the amount of bandwidth that is needed to transfer the z and color data between the memory and the graphics processor that computes the per-sample z and color data also increases. Increased memory and bandwidth consumption may result in decreased graphics processing performance and/or increased system cost.
Thus, there is a need for addressing the issues of increased storage and increased memory bandwidth and/or other issues associated with the prior art.